Television-based entertainment systems are expanding the programming and services that they offer. In addition to television program content such as that found on broadcast and traditional cable networks, television service providers are adding on-demand video, as well as other interactive services, features, and applications. Such content and additional information are downloaded over a network for display, use, and/or storage on client-side set-top boxes or similar devices. Because of bandwidth constraints, downloads that include audio and/or video information, for example, are transmitted in a coded or compressed format. In other words, to reduce the amount of data that is transmitted, the information is typically compressed from a first size to a second smaller size.
After the compressed/coded data is transmitted, the data is decompressed/decoded into a semblance of the original audio and video information. Unfortunately, because the compression-decompression cycle is typically lossy, the decompressed version of the audio and video information differs from the original version of the audio and video information. With video information, for example, such differences can result in the presentation quality of the video information being visibly decreased.
Accordingly, for television-based entertainment systems, there is a need for schemes and techniques to enable post-processing improvements to video information that has been adulterated in a compression-decompression cycle.